I plan on transferring from a CC to a 4 year school next year, and I figured it might be hard to make friends with other juniors since by then friend groups are pretty established. I’m thinking I should get used to being immediately surrounded by people not exactly my age (within 1 year of mine, as weird as that sounds).
In college, classes are not segregated by age or class year. You may have students who are freshmen and those who are seniors taking the same class, especially when you are in gen ed classes or those that have a wide general interest so they attract students from other majors.
In addition, not everyone starts college at the same time. Some people take gap years, some people start college several years later after being in the military or working a job.
Bottom line, you will be in classes with a range of ages and you will not be around only those that are the same age as you. You’re friends can be any age.
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My son is a junior. Most of his friends are juniors, but certainly not all. He definitely has friends who are seniors and sophomores too.
This is definitely true. In my D’s close group of friends, she was the youngest, having started college while she was still 17. One girl in her group was 19, going on 20. That girl had taken a gap year and was an older student in her senior year of high school. I don’t think my D noticed any substantial difference in the group dynamic.
My D is a sophomore and has friends in all 4 classes - some from her dorm, some from clubs she joined, and some from classes. This semester, she is taking her first foreign language class there (a 300-level, because she got a Biliteracy seal from our state and that was where they placed her) and everyone else is a junior or senior.
Likely, the first people you meet will be other transfer students followed by people you live near, classmates, club members. Like the “outside world”, you meet people who share some characteristic with you - your neighbors, coworkers, people you share similar interests with, etc - and age isn’t as important.
One D has very close friendships across all grades, the other mostly in her own year and the grade behind. Totally depends on the kid and activities involved in.
Even in high school my friends and classmates weren’t all in the same year as me. Some classes like orchestra, art, PE were always mixed with freshmen to seniors. Other classes like chemistry or math had jrs and seniors in them. Even within my grade, some kids were 2 years older than me (I was on the younger side, some were older and had repeated a grade).
College is even more so as students arrive with different levels of placement. A freshman could be in a very advanced math class while a senior could be taking a first level language class. Clubs, teams, the newspaper, church groups are all going to have those ranging from 18 to 30 on them. To make friends, do the things you like to do.
I dont have friends lol